Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  “Won’t bother you here!” The smile was wiped from the foreman’s face, and momentarily a grim ferocity came into it that made the narrow countenance with its pointed chin somehow Satanic. “Not here . . .”

  His insistence seemed somehow sinister. “I’m going with you,” the girl gulped. “I won’t stay away from Bob that long.”

  She tried to shove past him. But his hand was on her arm, his long-fingered bony hand. It stopped her. His black glittering eyes took hers, were gimlets of black flame boring into her brain.

  “I said you are safe in here. I’ll go bond for that. But if you put one foot over this threshold—” Kane’s voice dropped to an ominous, fearful whisper—“I could not protect you if I were the devil himself. The moon and the desert have spawned evil, prowling things out there, and they have scented you, and they are waiting for you.

  “It will do your Bob no good if I save him and he wakes up to find you—what you will be when they get through with you.”

  Shudders of icy dread shook Ann’s slender frame. Kane whipped around, was through the door. Momentarily Ann was rigid, incapable of movement, and in that moment the door slammed behind him, footsteps pounded on hard sand, a motor roared. The girl fought her hand to the doorknob. The car she heard roared away. . . .

  It was too late. He was gone, Kane was gone. And she was alone, alone in the hollow with—the foul spawn of the desert! Surging terror jerked her hand to the bolt, rattled it home. . . .

  FOR A LONG time Ann remained in the grip of a nightmare paralysis, staring unseeingly at the rough-planed panels of the door. What was Kane? What was his power over the crawling horrors of the sands . . . ?

  Or had he any such power? Was she sure, dead sure, that the eerie cry that had cleared them from her path had come from him? It had seemed sourceless, had seemed to invest the atmosphere from all directions at once. . . .

  But when he returned—if he returned—he would bring Bob with him. She must get ready. . . .

  The light here came from a lantern hanging on a hook beside the entrance. Ann lifted it off, turned to locate herself. The structure was hastily thrown together; the walls and partitions were of rough, unpainted lumber, joists and studding not covered. Angular shadows moved as she moved the lantern, slithered menacingly. The sharp odor of new-sawed wood stung her nostrils, mingled with the stench of man-sweat, the rubbery aroma of boots, the stench of machine-grease, of strong soap, of stale tobacco. The place was alive with the aura of occupancy, yet it was deathly silent.

  Had Kane pointed to left or right when he spoke of heating water on the range? Ann could not remember. She would have to look. A curious reluctance slowed her movements as she reached for the driven nail serving as knob to the nearest door. What was behind it? What would she find behind it? She pulled it open.

  Light struck into a big room, showed an overturned table, cards strewn over the floor, a lumberjacket in a heap in the corner, a smashed chair. Chaos. Had a drink-maddened brawl done this, bearing out Kane’s glib explanation of the flying truck? It might have, except for one thing. There was no smell of alcohol here, there were no flasks emptied or full, no glasses of any kind. . . .

  The nape of Ann’s neck prickled. Something had happened here. Something that had disrupted an orderly gathering into hasty, disorganized flight. Something about which Haldon Kane had lied.

  But Bob would soon be here. Time later to investigate; now she must get a bed ready for him, hot water, bandages. A bed! Sheets to rip for bandages! None here. Maybe in this next room.

  No. This was an office, the foreman’s office. A rude desk told her that, a small safe with its door open. Here too were signs of panicky departure. Blueprints spilling from a rude cupboard in the corner, a pen stuck point down in the floor, ink blotching the place where it had stabbed. Papers disorderly on the desk, held down by— What was it?

  Ann took a step nearer, lifting her lantern to throw a stronger light. The black, slender thing coiled ominously on the table-top, ended in a thicker, wire-wound handle. It was a whip, a short-handled, cruel whip. A bull-whip such as she had seen mule-freighters use, in the borax mines on the journey here. But they had no mules here, no oxen. . . . The end of the lash trailed over the further edge of the desk, was hidden by it. Oddly fascinated, the girl circled till she could see it.

  The long lash ended in a snapper, a barbed thing such as she had seen raise weals on the tough skin of a mule. This one glistened in the light. A drop formed, dripped off, splashed on the floor. It was a frayed disk of red on the planed board. It was a splotch of blood!

  An iron band constricted Ann’s temples, and the floor heaved under her feet.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WHERE HORROR FED

  From somewhere came a muffled roar. Ann’s head jerked up. It was the sound of a motor laboring, pounding against the clogging desert sand. Kane was coming back. Had he found Bob? Was he bringing Bob back with him?

  The girl whirled, her feet pounded wood. She reached the outer door, rattled the bolt free, grabbed for the knob, twisted it and pushed. . . .

  The door would not open. Somehow it had jammed. The car sound was louder now, was right outside. Ann pushed again, threw her weight against the portal. It was immovable.

  Good God! It hadn’t jammed. It was locked! Locked from the outside!

  The car didn’t stop! Mother of Mercy, it hadn’t stopped! It had passed; its noise was growing fainter, was dying down. Was it some other car than Kane’s, perhaps? Or . . . ?

  Ann beat small fists on the wood, pounded till her hands were bruised and bleeding. “Bob!” she screamed. “Bob!”

  Something like a laugh answered her, a mocking laugh, muffled by wall and by distance. There was a window somewhere on this side of the structure, a window from which light had glowed. The frantic girl twisted away from the locked door, toward it.

  Then she was at it, was peering out through glass. Her own face stared back at her from blackness. The lantern glared behind it. The lantern! Of course! Its light was stronger than that outside, was making a mirror of the pane.

  Whimpering, Ann smashed the lamp to the floor, reckless of fire. She could see through now, could see the desert spectral in the moonlight, could just see a dilapidated, open flivver plowing toward the gaunt timbers of the ghost town. Someone was hunched over the wheel, and beside him a body folded limp over the car side, its arms hanging down, its hands just touching the running-board. Bob!

  The window was framed glass; its sash did not lift. The girl flailed at it with her bare hands. Glass splintered, crashed. Her fingers were bloody, her knuckles gashed. She plucked shards from their hold in the frame, uncaring. She lifted to the high sill, squirmed through. Jagged edges of broken glass caught at her, tore her frock. She dropped to the sand outside, sprawled. Then she exploded to her feet and was running toward the ruins of Deadhope.

  Down there, where those skeleton timbers affronted the sky, nothing stirred. Nothing at all. While she had battered at the window the laboring car had vanished into nothingness as the crawlers had vanished. She could see it no longer, could no longer hear it. But she could see the tracks it had left in the desert, long tracks reaching clear into the mazed shadows of the skeleton village. She could follow them. Staggering, stumbling, reeling, she could follow them to where Bob had been taken.

  The soft sand sifted from beneath her flying feet, gave no footing. Even through her desperation, her frenzy of anxiety for her husband, her soul-sapping fear for him and for herself, the feeling of eerie unreality flooded back on her that first had manifested itself when she awoke in the car to see a world flooded by ghostly moonlight. The naked timbers ahead seemed to retreat as she ran, as if she were spinning a treadmill beneath her, an eternally wheeling treadmill on which she would run forever and make no headway. Pain strapped her leg muscles, stabbed her bursting lungs. Yet somehow she seemed no nearer her goal. No nearer . . .

  THE PALLID DESERT all about her was blotched by shadows that weirdly
were other than shadows. The sands shimmered like water under the moonlight, like water furrowed by the wind, swirling into a whirlpool. Ann gasped, halted her headlong rush, her heels digging into the silt, her eyes staring. There was a circular, wide wallow here where the desert had been plowed up, torn, trampled by some terrific struggle. As though some great beast—or some man—had fought here long and unavailingly against a ravening something that had dragged him down at last.

  Yes, here was the mark of shod feet and here—blood-darkened—the depression his body had made when it had come down. The shifting sand had kept the shape of the impact because it had been wetted—wetted red by life-fluid spurting from severed veins. And from this spot a long furrow started to run along with the tire-tracks Ann followed! Vividly, as if the tragedy were being reënacted before her pulsing eyes, the girl could see what had made it: the gore-bathed corpse pouring blood; the slimy, crawling things dragging their victim to their lair. . . .

  The record was plainly written—too plainly—in the sand. No wonder they had fled in crazed terror from this dire hollow, the half-mad men in the truck. No wonder they had not dared to stop when Bob—

  Bob! Oh, God! He was somewhere in there, somewhere in the ruined town ahead to which the crawlers had dragged their prey! Ann’s larynx clamped on a scream, and she was running once more, was following the twin tracks of the flivver in which Bob’s limp body had been, was following the blood-darkened furrow that gibbered at her an awful promise of what it was to which her lover had been taken.

  On and on, endlessly, she ran, till—suddenly—barred shadows fell across her and she leapt aside, panting. . . .

  It was only the shadow of a tumbledown house, stripped of its siding. Others clustered around, the rotted skeletons of a vanished town, the fleshless bones of Deadhope! But where was the flivver? Where was Bob?

  The girl reeled, paused, gasping for breath. She staggered against a rotting beam, clung to it, gagging, retching. Her heart pounded against her heaving ribs as though it would break through the thin confining wall of her chest. She lifted a hand to her breast to still it, felt paper rustle under her hand. Paper! The formulae of Bob’s process. Bob’s secret.

  Bob’s secret! Dizzy, nauseated, afraid, the thought pounded into Ann’s brain. BOB’S SECRET. She must keep it safe. She glanced around with eyes crafty, not wholly sane. No one was in sight. The jumbled beams against which she leaned screened her from observation. Here were two that made a cross, an inverted cross, and beneath them was another that lay close to the ground so that there was only a slit beneath it. Ann clawed at her bosom, clawed out the precious envelope, shoved it under that beam. There was no sign of digging to betray that cache, but the envelope was out of sight and it was marked by a sign she would not forget. The sign of the inverted cross. The sign of Satan.

  The momentary rest somewhat restored her. She could breathe again and her vision had cleared. There were the tracks, the rutted tracks of the car that had carried her Bob, winding among the strewn timbers of the ghost town. And there, still marching with them, was the grim furrow dug by that which had been dragged here. Ann’s eyes followed that grisly spoor, probed a pool of shadow, some fifty feet ahead, to which it led.

  It wasn’t a shadow! It was a grey-black shapeless mound in the barred moonglow, a mound that heaved restlessly, a mound that was animate with gruesome life. Through the desert hush sounds came clearly to Ann, smacking sounds, low whimperings, the scrape of a gnawing tooth on bone. That gruesome shape was feeding! On what?

  A hand squeezed Ann’s heart, and an awful fear sheathed her with quivering cold. The furrow of the dragged corpse led straight to that squirming pile, and the tracks of the car in which Bob had been brought here! What was it that composed that grisly meal?

  Sound rasped through the girl’s cramped larynx. A whine, a whimper—it was not a word. It was not anything one could have recognized as human speech. But perhaps He understood it, He to whom that prayer of a woman’s tortured soul was spoken. Perhaps He knew that the racked brain of the devoted wife was saying, over and over: “God! Dear God! It isn’t Bob. It isn’t. It can’t be. Please, God, don’t let it be Bob.”

  PERHAPS HE HEARD and touched that loathly tumulus with His finger. Perhaps Ann’s sob of agony and dread reached the ghastly feeders. At any rate, the heaving mass split apart. Grey, earth-hugging forms slithered away from it, like satiated vermin from their putrid feast, slithered through the sand, out of range of Ann’s vision. She did not see where they went, saw nothing but the motionless something to which her burning gaze clung, that which they had left behind. A nausea retched her stomach, but she could not see—she could not be certain what it was at which she stared.

  She could not be certain, and she had to be. She pushed herself away from the beam against which she leaned, took a reeling step toward—toward the motionless, awfully motionless debris ahead. Her legs, water-weak, buckled, and she tumbled headlong into the sand.

  She moaned, and then was crawling toward it, was shoving palms down into gritty, cutting sand, was lifting herself on breaking arms, dragging herself onward little by little. And all the while the dread question grew in her shaken mind like a bubble blown in acid, burst so that she did not know why she crawled, and grew again.

  Time was a grey nothingness that flowed over her. The anguish of her ripped hands, of her torn knees, was a pulsing torment she did not feel. She was mumbling, “Not Bob. God. Not Bob,” and she did not know what it was she said nor why she said it. But she kept going, eternally, hitching through the sand, dragging the agony of her body and her soul to a destination she had forgotten but that she knew she must reach.

  The pallid desert must have pitied her then, the desert and the shadows that moved on its spectral breast and were not shadows. Even They must have pitied her, the leprous-faced horrors that crawled—or did They think her one of them, this tatter-clothed, crawling woman with the contorted features of dementia and the eyes glowing red with madness? At any rate they let her pass unscathed until her outreaching hand fell upon something that was not sand, something that rolled and left a red, wet stain on the sand where it had lain.

  The clammy, shuddersome feel of the thing upon which Ann’s hand had fallen shocked her back to reason. To reason and the flooding horror of her search. She shoved up on extended arms, arching her back; she looked dazedly about her.

  Madness pulsed in her once more as she stared at that which the crawlers had left—at tattered, gnawed flesh; at a torso from whose ribs meat hung in frayed strips, at a skull that had been scraped quite clean so that the grinning bone glowed whitely in the lunar rays. And everywhere on the pitiful remnants that once had been human were the marks of teeth, of human teeth!

  But even through the swirling blackness that mounted in her brain, the gibbering question still screamed its query. Who was it? Bob? Was it Bob? How could she tell? How could she tell when there was no face left on this, no skin?

  Whimpering, Ann looked hopelessly down at that upon which her hand still rested. It was a bone that had been torn loose, a thigh-bone. Hanging to it by a shred of ligament was the long calf-bone, bits of flesh still adhering, and the foot was quite untouched. The foot! The right foot!

  Ann remembered. It was Bob’s right ankle that had been broken!

  And this—right ankle was—whole!

  Oh, God! Oh, thank God!

  Something gave way within Ann and she slid down and down into weltering, merciful blackness.

  SOMEONE WAS SHAKING her. Someone was whispering, “Mrs. Travers. Mrs. Travers. Wake up.”

  Someone was bending over her. Ann’s eyes came open, and she saw Kane’s narrow face in the moonlight, its lips writhing. Somehow she was on her feet. Bone crunched under her heel, but she did not notice it. Her hands shot out, gripped the lapels of Kane’s coat.

  “Where is Bob?” she shrilled. “What have you done with him?”

  Strong fingers clutched her wrists, tore them away. “Come out of here,�
�� Kane said. “Quickly.”

  A howl sliced across the words, a howl of animal threat. Arms went around her and lifted her, cradled her. The man was running, breathing hard, was plunging through the vague moonlight that glowed around them. Ann twisted around in the arms that carried her, saw Kane’s face above her, sharper, more Satanic than ever as its eyes slitted dangerously, as lips curled away from dull-white, huge teeth in a narrow mouth.

  She beat at his breast with futile thrusts. “Where’s Bob?”

  He carried her across the silvered desert, carried her toward the black bulk of the barracks. “I don’t—know,” he gritted. “I don’t know.”

  Ann squirmed, fighting to get free. The grip of his arms was unrelenting, inescapable. “You lie,” she spat at him. “What have you done with him?”

  “I’m not lying,” the man grunted. “He wasn’t there when I found the wreck. He was gone.”

  Fury was a red flame swirling in Ann’s brain. “You lie,” she screeched again. “You’ve got him somewhere in there, somewhere in Deadhope. I saw your flivver pass the house and I saw him in it.”

  “My—flivver?” The nostrils of his tremendous hooked nose flared, and white spots showed in the thin-drawn skin on either side of it. “Not mine. I have no flivver. Look, this is my car.”

  They had reached the entrance to the barracks. A car puffed before it, the engine running. It was an old Dodge sedan! A Dodge! A sedan! But the car Ann had seen dart past and vanish into the barred shadows of the ghost town had been a Model T. It had been a touring car in which Kane had brought back Bob’s horribly limp body. . . .

  Wait! She had not seen the driver clearly. Was it Kane? She could not be certain. Oh, God! She was not certain it had been Kane.

  “He was gone when I got there,” Haldon Kane said again. Ann had ceased struggling. He set her down. But he had to support her as they took the few further steps to the barracks door, so weak she was from exhaustion, from terror and wild anxiety. “I found the overturned roadster, the cushions by its side on which he had lain. But no one. No one living . . .”